My Weekend With The iPad

We got ourselves an iPad -- the SAIpad -- over the weekend. After syncing it up with iTunes, we immediately started tweeting our impressions.

Here's what we wrote (plus translations from tweetese into English):

"Gotta say you guys never looked better than you do on this little tabler" -- I wrote this after popping open TweetDeck for iPad. It's very shiny and the UI is impressive. (You can flick each column -- "All Friends," "Mentions," and "Direct Messages" to scroll all three at the same time.)

"typing is awkward" -- Notice the typo in my first tweet? I did. You can't touch-type on the iPad. The "hunt and peck" method works much better. Thanks for the 7th grade typing lessons, Mom.

"Ok abc's iPad app is really impressive" It is. I sat in an easy chair and watched three episodes of "Modern Family" in a row. It felt like I was holding a tiny HD TV.

"You can fly between apps so fast you don't really miss multitasking." There is no lag in opening apps. They are instant on. (Of course this will change as iPads get old and developers take advantage of the speed to unfortunately build heavier, clunkier apps.)

"I actually prefer typing in vertical mode because it's easier to use your thumbs like you would an iPhone" I'm used to hunting and pecking with my thumbs after two years with an iPhone. The horizontal keyboard makes me want to rest my fingers on the asdf and jkl; keys like I was taught in that 7th grade typing class.

"The app prices have to come down for me to impulse buy them." I use a lot of iPhone apps. That's because they're either free or $1.99, which feels about free. Sorry Time, I'm not going to pay $4 for a single issue of your magazine.

"The iPhone seems way better for emailing, because this keyboard is extremely awkward. #ipad" Yeah, I couldn't let go of this point.

"@iChristina2010 wsj, aim, tweet deck, twitteriffic, abc, harbor master HD" @iChristina asked me which apps I had downloaded. For what it's worth, these are the few that jumped to mind first.

"OK I was wrong, tweedeck isn't a good iPad app, it's a brilliant desktop app for those of us with 2 or more monitors." Last week, I went nuts over a preview of TweetDeck on the iPad. By the end of the weekend, I'd given up on it in favor of Twitteriffic, which is a better solution for a single screen mobile device. (I'm very anxious for Tweetie, which is what I use on the iPhone.)

"Boy does the iPad screen get greasy. Ew."

"Hooked my bluetooth keyboard to the iPad and I LOVE IT. missing: keyboard shortcuts. In Tweetdeck, "Command-Enter" should "send" the tweet." This was a eureka moment.

"I cannot overstate this. Hooking the iPad to a blue tooth keyboard boosts its usefulness tremendously. It's almost a relief." Why was this such a big deal? Imagine me, a writer, sitting with an iPad finally feeling like I could use it for email and word processing.

"@antderosa Because a laptop is $500+ more expensive, isn't as good at eBooks, plane-friendly video, or nearly so portable" @antederosa asked the natural question: If the iPad needs a keyboard so bad, why not just get a laptop? This was my answer.